


To the Dark

by clockheartedcrocodile



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Bedside Vigils, Blood and Injury, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28079205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockheartedcrocodile/pseuds/clockheartedcrocodile
Summary: “You must mind yourself for a time, do you understand? You have a commotion of the brain. In striking your head you have rattled it about your skull. Lay off the wine for a time and have a care when walking the quarterdeck.”
Relationships: Jack Aubrey/Sophie Williams, Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin
Comments: 10
Kudos: 49





	To the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> _The first time ever I saw your face  
>  I thought the sun rose in your eyes  
> And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave  
> To the dark and the endless sky_
> 
> _The first time ever I kissed your mouth  
>  I felt the earth move in my hand  
> Like the trembling heart of a captive bird  
> That was there at my command, my love_

“The long and short of it, Stephen, is that it made for a poor end to an otherwise agreeable morning,” said Jack Aubrey, turning his head first to the left and then to the right for Dr. Maturin’s inspection. “To come at a ship-of-the-line in little more than a square-rigged smack, and then to run away like dogs . . . It’s lunacy, sir. Carelessness. I wish them all hanged.”

“Mr. Reed is injured,” said Stephen. He’d taken to feeling out the back of Jack’s skull with his fingertips, looking for the source of the bleeding. His nails were already caked with another man’s blood. “Mr. Comb as well. Mr. Wolverton.”

Jack nodded slowly. “They will recover?”

“I have no doubt, though all three will be bedridden for some days,” said Stephen. “Now look me in the eye. Unblinking, for all love,” he added, when Jack looked at him. Then he made a clicking sound with his tongue. “I see. Again to the left and right, or if it please you, the port and starboard?”

This last Stephen said with a look of such smugness that Jack had trouble keeping his composure. Again he turned his head from one side to the other, and again Stephen clicked his tongue. “No more fussing, pray,” said Jack without much conviction. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

Stephen gestured mutely with one hand- _turn about-_ and Jack rotated on the stool, the better for Stephen to undo the ribbon clubbing his hair. “I had thought these waters free of pirates.”

“As had I,” said Jack sourly. “What is the St. John thinking of?” He looked back over his shoulder. “Do you suppose they’ve sunk her, Stephen?”

“Peace, Jack. Peace,” said Stephen. His fingertips came away bloodied, and again he touched Jack’s skull beneath his damp yellow hair. “There you are- I have got it at last. Hold your queue over your shoulder thus and I shall sponge the blood.”

“Thankee, Stephen.”

“It is no great thing,” said Stephen warmly. He touched a damp rag to the wound and began to clean it, minding the rough tug of the cloth. “You must mind yourself for a time, do you understand? You have a commotion of the brain. In striking your head you have rattled it about your skull,” Jack grimaced. Stephen, taking it for shock at a trickle of water down the collar, touched his shirtsleeve to the back of Jack’s neck. “Lay off the wine for a time and have a care when walking the quarterdeck.”

The urge to simply close his eyes and let Stephen attend to him was almost intolerable, but by a great force of will, Jack did not succumb. “I shall have to stay up- a full night, at least.”

“By no means,” said Stephen sharply. “Your sleep has been curtailed after scarcely three hours twice in as many days. I know you have a flea in your ear about commotion of the brain-”

“I have known better men than I to die in their sleep after a knock on the head,” said Jack. “A few days without sleep won’t trouble me. I’ve gone longer with less in a squall.”

Stephen, to his credit, said no more about it, and merely began to braid Jack’s hair back into its queue. Jack did close his eyes at that, thinking rather warmly of how long it had been since he had felt Stephen’s hands upon his person. It was an impossibility aboard the Surprise, of course, for any action taken aboard a man-of-war must be considered a matter of public interest, but there were times when Jack greatly wished to pick Stephen up and kiss his face and hair until he squirmed.

Jack had been dreaming of such a thing, in fact. It had been a very fine dream- something to make even a sailor blush- when he’d been shocked awake by the cry of, “Beat to quarters!” and the sound of footsteps thundering up and down the orlop. Then came the action, and the strike from the spar, and the bloodied bodies of pirates scraped from the deck as their ship beat a hasty retreat. It was a nasty, short, pointless action, and it irritated Jack to think of it.

“There,” Stephen said, affixing the ribbon in Jack’s queue. “As fine a knot as ever a sailor tied. I am your equal in seamanship, Jack Aubrey. I shall fight you for the captaincy.”

“Villain,” Jack said, reaching back on the pretense of straightening the braid. “Mutineer.”

His fingertips brushed Stephen’s wrist, and he felt Stephen’s breath warm on the back of his neck. _What I would give,_ he thought, _to be with him in my little cottage with Sophia and the girls. If I am not careful, he’ll turn me into a landsman._

“Not long now until we water at the cape,” he said, rising. He smiled at Stephen. “You shall have your naturalizing. I am told there are all manner of dreadful lizards at the cape.”

“Oh, I am with child to see a dreadful lizard.”

“And so you shall. The very worst of them.”

It was a quiet, smooth-sailing day after the early morning action, and Jack found that he had difficulty concentrating. He observed the men at their holystoning with such scrutiny that they rubbed their knuckles raw with effort, he wrote letters to Sophia that grew increasingly nonsensical, and all the while he felt a constant throbbing headache, and the beginnings of fatigue stiffening his limbs. Action left him tired as death, sure as time and tide, and as Stephen had said, his sleep had already been curtailed.

Relief came to him only once, in the form of a swim to stave off exhaustion. Swimming thus with his hair loose about his shoulders and the winter-cold water numbing his skin, Jack felt suitably refreshed, but upon returning to the deck fatigue struck him again at full force. The harsh sunlight struck him as intolerable. Stephen, preoccupied with the injured topmen, was nowhere to be found. They would not water at the cape until the morning.

That evening as Jack paced the quarterdeck, watching the stars come out and thinking miserably of the long and sleepless night ahead, Killick approached him with a heated greatcoat and scarf. Jack mumbled something obliging as he shrugged into it, reluctant to admit that he had been cold, and when Killick left him he was still standing with his head upturned, trying to remember what he had dreamed of the night before.

It was a clear, cold night, and a great sense of peace had descended upon the ship. Jack had a mind to call Stephen up for music, but had hardly entered the great cabin when Stephen followed behind him unannounced and draped himself across Jack’s locker. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” he said, removing his wig and flinging it violently into the corner of the cabin. “I have had enough of patients and busybodies. I shall take to the sea and become a _Chelonia mydas,_ which is to say, the great sea turtle, who recognizes no gods nor kings.”

“How good to see you, Stephen,” said Jack fondly. “Mr. Reed has been recovering? Mr. Wolverton?”

Stephen waved a careless hand. “Yes, yes. Recovering. I have had no time to prepare for my naturalizing to-morrow and Mr. Comb has drunk the wine in which I embalmed my asp. Will I tell you?”

“Please, and let us have music,” said Jack, waving Stephen off his locker so that he might retrieve his violin. “We will play for a time, and you shall air grievances to your heart’s content.”

“My dear,” said Stephen, setting aside his bow and lifting his glass, which he drank off with his ‘cello still at rest between his knees. “There is such a thing as adagio. I pray you would keep to it.”

“Forgive me,” Jack set his violin aside with a grimace and inspected his hand. “It would seem I haven’t a mind for music tonight after all.”

“Now that is troubling. Give me your hand. Why, it shakes as much as mine.”

“It is the winter air.”

“And does the winter air account also for the headaches?” said Stephen drily. “The sensitivity to light? The sweetness of your eyes?”

“Is there a sweetness?” said Jack, feeling oddly moved. His touched his fingertips to his own cheek. “Sophia always did say there was a sweetness.”

“I mean to say that your pupils are over-wide,” said Stephen. He brought his hand to Jack’s chin and tilted his head down, the better to look him in the eye.

Jack flushed. He was no stranger to familiarity and physical affections, but it was quite another thing to have Stephen handle him so directly. The brisk movement of Stephen’s hand had excited him, and his blushed deepened as Stephen turned his head to the side and squinted up at his iris. “Ah, well. There may be any explanation for such a sweetness,” he managed at last.

Jack had often observed a piercing quality to Stephen’s eyes, like that of sunlight on a gun barrel. They were quite colorless, and at this moment they were narrowed in a shrewd and suspicious look. “Hmm,” he said, and nothing more.

“Here,” Jack touched his hand to Stephen’s where it still rested upon his cheek. “The hour is late, and we will be watering to-morrow. Put up your hammock.”

Stephen lowered his hand. “And what will you do, precisely, while I am in the arms of Morpheus?”

“I will read,” said Jack, with vague thoughts of astronomy. “Or I will make calculations. Perhaps I will observe the stars.”

“Hell’s teeth, Jack. I wish you would sleep. It is what I prescribe to you,” said Stephen. He made an aborted little movement as though to tip his chair back upon its hind legs in a cavalier manner, but the rise and fall of the ship caught him by surprise and he clutched the edge of the table, looking murderous.

Jack’s heart clenched with something like adoration. “I will be perfectly quiet. Mouselike in my habits. I won’t wake you.”

Stephen eased his grip upon the table. “You will not wake me, sir. I have no intention of sleeping.”

“You have your naturalizing to-morrow.”

“What stuff,” said Stephen, waving a hand. “It is all one to me. I shall play you at cards, if you promise not to lose too much, and perhaps your king will finally face my bishop, hmm?”

Jack, long familiar with the dangers of attempting to turn Stephen’s mind from its course, brightened considerably. “I shall call Killick in for coffee,” he said, his spirits soaring. “Thank you, my dear. And after, chess- oh, how I love to play you at chess, old Stephen. You are improving, you know!”

As it happened, Stephen had improved only a little since last they played, and it was very late in the first watch before he first took Jack’s queen. The game was over then and there- the king checked and mated, and the board swept clean of white to Stephen’s black- and Jack’s fatigue was so great that he could only sit stupefied with love. Stephen, having drunk through the majority of Killick’s rat piss coffee, had poured a little wine in celebration and drank it off like a man victorious. Wine was one of the indulgences best calculated to make Jack sleepy- that and a rich, thick cake, or plum duff.

“The game is yours, my dear,” Jack sighed, leaning his elbow upon the table and his chin upon his hand. “All is yours. I am yours.”

Stephen gave him a knowing look. “Do not think that because you are over-tired I will forfeit the victory,” he said, clearing the board and turning once again to their deck of cards. These he dealt with a dizzying speed that made Jack’s tired eyes ache. “I am perfectly content to wear you out one game at a time, until you consent to sleep out the rest of the night merely to escape me.”

Jack had not thought on sleep so much in a very long time. It was not one of his great vices. Sure, sleep was sweet, and came in a thousand different varieties. The dazed, blissful sleep of a man after lovemaking. The restless sleeps at the cottage with Sophia, when at any moment he might be poked and prodded awake by the small, sticky hands of his infant daughters. The deep, inviolate sleeps of his youth, perched high in the crosstrees and rocked to and fro by the motion of the ship that cradled him.

No, Jack had never dwelled upon sleep, except perhaps as it related to Stephen, for the sight of Stephen sleeping was a rare and gratifying thing. Once, when they’d wintered in the country, Jack had come downstairs to find Stephen and Sophia asleep in front of the fire, her chin upon his shoulder and his head pillowed upon her hair. The sight of it had warmed Jack’s heart through the coldest of nights.

Stephen talked in his sleep- a sin in a spy- and though Jack might sleep through a gale there had been nights when he lay in his berth and simply gazed at him, swaying in his hammock and asleep like the dead but for the occasional disheartened murmur. On other nights Jack knew him to take laudanum. A few drops on the back of his tongue put him out like a light, plummeting at once into a deep and dreamless stupor that left him waking refreshed and revitalized, a new man.

“If it please you,” Jack mumbled, his vision swimming as he looked down at his cards. “I do wish you would sleep more.”

Stephen looked at him over the brim of his glasses. “That _I_ should sleep more, my dear?”

Jack tried to explain that the sight of Stephen well-slept was tantamount to the sight of him well-fed, the his wellbeing was of the utmost importance to him and that he should like nothing better than for Stephen to disgrace the Royal Navy with his laziness and gluttony, but the words would not come, and he merely muttered an awkward assent. _Brought by the lee again, Jack._

Ah, but if it were his little cottage in the country, it wouldn’t signify. There he might hold Stephen while he slept, and Sophia too, one in each arm. In the early hours of the evening, when the snow fell thick and soft upon the eaves and the children were out at play, Stephen might lay Jack down upon his back and call him the finest man in the Navy, the handsomest, the most desirable. Perhaps they would make love until exhaustion took them, and Stephen, gazing at him with a look of dearest love, might lay upon Jack’s person and make of him a comfortable pillow.

Such evenings had been few, very few. Evenings when they might sleep as they pleased, and the embrace of winter meant not rough seas and unforgiving winds but snow and suckling pig and starlight.

 _“Acushla,”_ said Stephen, very gently. “My joy, are you asleep?”

“I am not,” said Jack, blinking and looking around him. “I am perfectly well. What is the time?”

Stephen reached across the table and touched Jack’s wrist. “Bed,” he murmured. “I’ll have Killick fetch you a hot water bottle and the good blanket.”

“It is all right, Stephen?” Jack rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, feeling the sting of near-sleep prickling at his eyelids. “I mean to say, is it . . ?”

“I shall sling my hammock there, as is my custom,” said Stephen, nodding to a corner of the great cabin, “and I shall stay up, and wake you every hour if you like.”

“Oh, Stephen,” said Jack, grateful beyond all measure. “I should love that of all things.”

Stephen squeezed Jack’s hand and stood, gathering up the cards on the table. If they had been ashore Jack would have kissed Stephen full upon the mouth, and embraced him tightly enough to lift him from the ground.

Sleep came to him as a series of half-formed and syrupy dozes, aided by the swaying of the ship and the lapping of the waves upon her hull. Jack’s thoughts grew soft and muddled as they unspooled into dreams. At every hour he heard Stephen cover the lantern by which he’d been reading, and felt the touch of his hand upon his bare chest. When he woke it was with increasing confusion and reluctancy, the desire to stagger back into dreams very nearly outweighed by the almost childlike joy at hearing’s Stephen voice whisper, _it is such-and-such a bell, go back to sleep_.

“Stephen,” he would invariably murmur, reaching up thoughtlessly to pull him in, to somehow envelop him and tip Stephen forward into the arms of Jack’s own dreams, and invariably Stephen would breathe, “Jack,” in a pained and affectionate voice, and Jack would sink back down into the cradle of sleep.

Jack did not dream in colors- or rather, he dreamed only in colors made brilliant by music. In the harbor of the mind it did not seem so strange that the sky should be the color of Boccherini, or that his ship should be painted with the full-throated whisper of a ‘cello. Here the moon was an island like any other, and as he walked upon its surface Jack thought to himself, _how I wish Stephen were here_.

When morning came it crept in silently, sweetly, with a brisk sea and a cold nip of sunshine that teased Jack awake earlier than he would have liked. Killick brought him coffee- “Thankee, Killick,”- and Jack drank it slowly, watching the sun shine off the water through the cabin windows. In the distance he saw a brief spray of foaming water. “Hullo,” Jack said cheerfully to himself, watching the ripples for a fin. Sure enough, a smooth gray body touched the surface, then was gone. “Ah, he has rolled over. Good health to you, sir.”

Stephen sat scribbling at Jack’s writing-desk, having refused to retire to his hammock the whole night through, and he looked at Jack with tired, gentle eyes. “You are well, I take it?”

“I feel reborn,” Jack said, and it was true. He felt full and brimming with life. “I never slept so well, though you woke me every hour as you promised. I do thank you, Stephen.”

Stephen smiled and said nothing. He leaned back in his chair and stretched with a long, low groan, then slumped again in his seat. His hair was disheveled, and he had somehow contrived to lose both his neckcloth and his waistcoat in the course of the night. “Is it true that we shall be watering at the cape to-day?”

“I take your meaning, brother,” said Jack, fairly rocking back and forth upon his heels. “You shall have your naturalizing. Come back with an army of lizards in each hand.”

Stephen promised that he would, and he had more than ample time to do it. Watering at the cape took the better part of the day. The sky was cloudless and bright with unfettered sun, and Jack found he spent many an hour writing letters to Sophia, and imagining the look of joy upon her face when next he and Stephen should next come to England.

When Stephen returned from shore he was sunburnt and smiling, with a great frozen iguana in his hands. “See here,” he said excitedly, his face flushed red from cold. He held up the iguana for Jack’s inspection. “This dear creature is quite stunned by this weather, and moves hardly at all; look, it is corpse-like in attitude, and yet it lives. Touch it, I pray. Feel the icy skin.”

Jack warily touched the scales. “Astounding.”

“Wondrous,” said Stephen, looking fondly into the iguana’s face. “There’s glory for you, Jack. It resides in a lizard’s eye.”

“You are quite well, Stephen?” Jack asked anxiously. “It is only that the fatigue shows in your face, and you have brought home but one lizard, rather than the hogshead-full you’d hoped for.”

“I am perfectly well,” said Stephen, whereupon he dropped the lizard; it rolled some distance, pursued by a number of midshipmen eager for distraction, and came to rest near the bowsprit. Stephen, staring at the place in his hands where in had been, blinked twice in rapid succession.

“Sleep, I think,” said Jack, and Stephen said, “Perhaps.”

Reed and the rest required no physician- they would sleep the day away like proper invalids. Stephen had no letters that Jack knew of. As for the iguana, it was even now being passed hand to hand until it reached the doctor’s cockpit, where it was placed under a bowl on Stephen’s workbench lest it wake and begin to scurry. Given that Stephen’s affairs were in order and it had now grown late in the day, Jack had a mind to take him by the arm and steer him into the great cabin. He called for wine not long later, and Killick, who knew that Stephen preferred coffee after a sojourn on land, grunted ceaselessly as he brought it in.

“If I think you are making a patient of me,” Stephen muttered, slumped in his chair. He watched as Jack busied himself with the hammock. He had removed his glasses- an act of violence against Jack’s restraint, in Jack’s opinion- and now rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I am well aware of what is best for me, and I have suffered no commotion.”

“I would have you sleep,” said Jack. Then, in a lower voice, “Please, dear. I would have it.”

Stephen was silent for a moment or two, then rose. He divested himself of his waistcoat and stood patiently while Jack gently, unnecessarily, unbuttoned his cuffs and unwound his neckcloth. “I do not sleep very well,” he said quietly.

Jack, overwhelmed, looked helplessly up at him. “I know it. But I will play you something fine, a piece of my own, and I’ll mind that the ship doesn’t sink. And I’ll be here when you wake,” he added, very softly. “You can be sure of that.”

Stephen’s eyes fell closed and he sighed. “I would love that,” he murmured, as Jack led him forward to his hammock. “I would love that of all things.”

Jack ached to hold him. To love him with his hands, to touch, to treat him sweeter than he would like. There would be a time for that, sure. They had found time before and would find it again. But not here. Not on dear old Surprise.

So Jack held his violin instead, and played a color that he’d seen in his dreams, and played it until Stephen was well and truly asleep, and long into the night thereafter.


End file.
